IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable1 personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages. His story will be told here. His name was Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, and if his name-in contrast to the names of other gifted abominations, de Sade’s, for instance, or Saint-Just’s, Fbuche’s, Bonaparte’s, etc.-has been forgotten today, it is certainly not because Grenouille fell short of those more famous blackguards when it came to arrogance2, misanthropy, immorality3, or, more succinctly4, to wickedness, but because his gifts and his sole ambition were restricted to a domain5 that leaves no traces in history: to the fleeting6 realm of scent7.
In the period of which we speak, there reigned8 in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women. The streets stank9 of manure10, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlors11 stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy12 sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently13 sweet aroma14 of chamber15 pots. The stench of sulfur16 rose from the chimneys, the stench of caustic17 lyes from the tanneries, and from the slaughterhouses came the stench of congealed18 blood. People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies19 that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous20 disease. The rivers stank, the marketplaces stank, the churches stank, it stank beneath the bridges and in the palaces.The peasant stank as did the priest, the apprentice21 as did his master’s wife, the whole of the aristocracy stank, even the king himself stank, stank like a rank lion, and the queen like an old goat, summer and winter. For in the eighteenth century there was nothing to hinder bacteria busy at decomposition22, and so there was no human activity, either constructive23 or destructive, no manifestation24 of germinating25 or decaying life that was not accompanied by stench.
And of course the stench was foulest26 in Paris, for Paris was the largest city of France. And in turn there was a spot in Paris under the sway of a particularly fiendish stench: between the rue27 aux Fers and the rue de la Ferronnerie, the Cimetiere des Innocents to be exact. For eight hundred years the dead had been brought here from the Hotel-Dieu and from the surrounding parish churches, for eight hundred years, day in, day out, corpses28 by the dozens had been carted here and tossed into long ditches, stacked bone upon bone for eight hundred years in the tombs and charnel houses. Only later-on the eve of the Revolution, after several of the grave pits had caved in and the stench had driven the swollen29 graveyard30’s neighbors to more than mere31 protest and to actual insurrection -was it finally closed and abandoned. Millions of bones and skulls32 were shoveled33 into the catacombs of Montmartre and in its place a food market was erected34.
Here, then, on the most putrid35 spot in the whole kingdom, Jean-Baptiste Grenouilie was born on July 17, 1738. It was one of the hottest days of the year. The heat lay leaden upon the graveyard, squeezing its putrefying vapor36, a blend of rotting melon and the fetid odor of burnt animal horn, out into the nearby alleys37. When the labor38 pains began, Grenouille’s mother was standing39 at a fish stall in the rue aux Fers, scaling whiting that she had just gutted40. The fish, ostensibly taken that very morning from the Seine, already stank so vilely41 that the smell masked the odor of corpses. Grenouille’s mother, however, perceived the odor neither of the fish nor of the corpses, for her sense of smell had been utterly42 dulled, besides which her belly43 hurt, and the pain deadened all susceptibility to sensate impressions. She only wanted the pain to stop, she wanted to put this revolting birth behind her as quickly as possible. It was her fifth. She had effected all the others here at the fish booth, and all had been stillbirths or semi-stillbirths, for the bloody44 meat that had emerged had not differed greatly from the fish guts45 that lay there already, nor had lived much longer, and by evening the whole mess had been shoveled away and carted off to the graveyard or down to the river. It would be much the same this day, and Grenouille’s mother, who was still a young woman, barely in her mid-twenties, and who still was quite pretty and had almost all her teeth in her mouth and some hair on her head and-except for gout and syphilis and a touch of consumption-suffered from no serious disease, who still hoped to live a while yet, perhaps a good five or ten years, and perhaps even to marry one day and as the honorable wife of a widower46 with a trade or some such to bear real children... Grenouille’s mother wished that it were already over. And when the final contractions47 began, she squatted48 down under the gutting49 table and there gave birth, as she had done four times before, and cut the newborn thing’s umbilical cord with her butcher knife. But then, on account of the heat and the stench, which she did not perceive as such but only as an unbearable50, numbing51 something-like a field of lilies or a small room filled with too many daffodils-she grew faint, toppled to one side, fell out from under the table into the street, and lay there, knife in hand.
Tumult52 and turmoil53. The crowd stands in a circle around her, staring, someone hails the police. The woman with the knife in her hand is still lying in the street. Slowly she comes to.
What has happened to her?
“Nothing.”
What is she doing with that knife?
“Nothing.”
Where does the blood on her skirt come from?
“From the fish.”
She stands up, tosses the knife aside, and walks off to wash.
And then, unexpectedly, the infant under the gutting table begins to squall. They have a look, and beneath a swarm54 of flies and amid the offal and fish heads they discover the newborn child. They pull it out. As prescribed by law, they give it to a wet nurse and arrest the mother. And since she confesses, openly admitting that she would definitely have let the thing perish, just as she had with those other four by the way, she is tried, found guilty of multiple infanticide, and a few weeks later decapitated at the place de Greve.
By that time the child had already changed wet nurses three times. No one wanted to keep it for more than a couple of days. It was too greedy, they said, sucked as much as two babies, deprived the other sucklings of milk and them, the wet nurses, of their livelihood55, for it was impossible to make a living nursing just one babe. The police officer in charge, a man named La Fosse, instantly wearied of the matter and wanted to have the child sent to a halfway56 house for foundlings and orphans57 at the far end of the rue Saint-Antoine, from which transports of children were dispatched daily to the great public orphanage58 in Rouen. But since these convoys59 were made up of porters who carried bark baskets into which, for reasons of economy, up to four infants were placed at a time; since therefore the mortality rate on the road was extraordinarily60 high; since for that reason the porters were urged to convey only baptized infants and only those furnished with an official certificate of transport to be stamped upon arrival in Rouen; since the babe Grenouille had neither been baptized nor received so much as a name to inscribe61 officially on the certificate of transport; since, moreover, it would not have been good form for the police anonymously62 to set a child at the gates of the halfway house, which would have been the only way to dodge63 the other formalities... thus, because of a whole series of bureaucratic64 and administrative65 difficulties that seemed likely to occur if the child were shunted aside, and because time was short as well, officer La Fosse revoked66 his original decision and gave instructions for the boy to be handed over on written receipt to some ecclesiastical institution or other, so that there they could baptize him and decide his further fate. He got rid of him at the cloister67 of Saint-Merri in the rue Saint-Martin. There they baptized him with the name Jean-Baptiste. And because on that day the prior was in a good mood and the eleemosynary fund not yet exhausted68, they did not have the child shipped to Rouen, but instead pampered69 him at the cloister’s expense. To this end, he was given to a wet nurse named Jeanne Bussie who lived in the rue Saint-Denis and was to receive, until further notice, three francs per week for her trouble.
1 abominable | |
adj.可厌的,令人憎恶的 | |
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2 arrogance | |
n.傲慢,自大 | |
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3 immorality | |
n. 不道德, 无道义 | |
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4 succinctly | |
adv.简洁地;简洁地,简便地 | |
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5 domain | |
n.(活动等)领域,范围;领地,势力范围 | |
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6 fleeting | |
adj.短暂的,飞逝的 | |
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7 scent | |
n.气味,香味,香水,线索,嗅觉;v.嗅,发觉 | |
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8 reigned | |
vi.当政,统治(reign的过去式形式) | |
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9 stank | |
n. (英)坝,堰,池塘 动词stink的过去式 | |
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10 manure | |
n.粪,肥,肥粒;vt.施肥 | |
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11 parlors | |
客厅( parlor的名词复数 ); 起居室; (旅馆中的)休息室; (通常用来构成合成词)店 | |
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12 greasy | |
adj. 多脂的,油脂的 | |
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13 pungently | |
adv.苦痛地,尖锐地 | |
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14 aroma | |
n.香气,芬芳,芳香 | |
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15 chamber | |
n.房间,寝室;会议厅;议院;会所 | |
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16 sulfur | |
n.硫,硫磺(=sulphur) | |
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17 caustic | |
adj.刻薄的,腐蚀性的 | |
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18 congealed | |
v.使凝结,冻结( congeal的过去式和过去分词 );(指血)凝结 | |
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19 bellies | |
n.肚子( belly的名词复数 );腹部;(物体的)圆形或凸起部份;腹部…形的 | |
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20 tumorous | |
肿胀的; 肿瘤性的; 浮华的; 浮夸的 | |
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21 apprentice | |
n.学徒,徒弟 | |
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22 decomposition | |
n. 分解, 腐烂, 崩溃 | |
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23 constructive | |
adj.建设的,建设性的 | |
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24 manifestation | |
n.表现形式;表明;现象 | |
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25 germinating | |
n.& adj.发芽(的)v.(使)发芽( germinate的现在分词 ) | |
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26 foulest | |
adj.恶劣的( foul的最高级 );邪恶的;难闻的;下流的 | |
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27 rue | |
n.懊悔,芸香,后悔;v.后悔,悲伤,懊悔 | |
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28 corpses | |
n.死尸,尸体( corpse的名词复数 ) | |
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29 swollen | |
adj.肿大的,水涨的;v.使变大,肿胀 | |
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30 graveyard | |
n.坟场 | |
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31 mere | |
adj.纯粹的;仅仅,只不过 | |
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32 skulls | |
颅骨( skull的名词复数 ); 脑袋; 脑子; 脑瓜 | |
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33 shoveled | |
vt.铲,铲出(shovel的过去式与过去分词形式) | |
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34 ERECTED | |
adj. 直立的,竖立的,笔直的 vt. 使 ... 直立,建立 | |
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35 putrid | |
adj.腐臭的;有毒的;已腐烂的;卑劣的 | |
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36 vapor | |
n.蒸汽,雾气 | |
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37 alleys | |
胡同,小巷( alley的名词复数 ); 小径 | |
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38 labor | |
n.劳动,努力,工作,劳工;分娩;vi.劳动,努力,苦干;vt.详细分析;麻烦 | |
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39 standing | |
n.持续,地位;adj.永久的,不动的,直立的,不流动的 | |
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40 gutted | |
adj.容易消化的v.毁坏(建筑物等)的内部( gut的过去式和过去分词 );取出…的内脏 | |
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41 vilely | |
adv.讨厌地,卑劣地 | |
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42 utterly | |
adv.完全地,绝对地 | |
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43 belly | |
n.肚子,腹部;(像肚子一样)鼓起的部分,膛 | |
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44 bloody | |
adj.非常的的;流血的;残忍的;adv.很;vt.血染 | |
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45 guts | |
v.狼吞虎咽,贪婪地吃,飞碟游戏(比赛双方每组5人,相距15码,互相掷接飞碟);毁坏(建筑物等)的内部( gut的第三人称单数 );取出…的内脏n.勇气( gut的名词复数 );内脏;消化道的下段;肠 | |
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46 widower | |
n.鳏夫 | |
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47 contractions | |
n.收缩( contraction的名词复数 );缩减;缩略词;(分娩时)子宫收缩 | |
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48 squatted | |
v.像动物一样蹲下( squat的过去式和过去分词 );非法擅自占用(土地或房屋);为获得其所有权;而占用某片公共用地。 | |
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49 gutting | |
n.去内脏v.毁坏(建筑物等)的内部( gut的现在分词 );取出…的内脏 | |
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50 unbearable | |
adj.不能容忍的;忍受不住的 | |
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51 numbing | |
adj.使麻木的,使失去感觉的v.使麻木,使麻痹( numb的现在分词 ) | |
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52 tumult | |
n.喧哗;激动,混乱;吵闹 | |
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53 turmoil | |
n.骚乱,混乱,动乱 | |
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54 swarm | |
n.(昆虫)等一大群;vi.成群飞舞;蜂拥而入 | |
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55 livelihood | |
n.生计,谋生之道 | |
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56 halfway | |
adj.中途的,不彻底的,部分的;adv.半路地,在中途,在半途 | |
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57 orphans | |
孤儿( orphan的名词复数 ) | |
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58 orphanage | |
n.孤儿院 | |
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59 convoys | |
n.(有护航的)船队( convoy的名词复数 );车队;护航(队);护送队 | |
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60 extraordinarily | |
adv.格外地;极端地 | |
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61 inscribe | |
v.刻;雕;题写;牢记 | |
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62 anonymously | |
ad.用匿名的方式 | |
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63 dodge | |
v.闪开,躲开,避开;n.妙计,诡计 | |
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64 bureaucratic | |
adj.官僚的,繁文缛节的 | |
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65 administrative | |
adj.行政的,管理的 | |
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66 revoked | |
adj.[法]取消的v.撤销,取消,废除( revoke的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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67 cloister | |
n.修道院;v.隐退,使与世隔绝 | |
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68 exhausted | |
adj.极其疲惫的,精疲力尽的 | |
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69 pampered | |
adj.饮食过量的,饮食奢侈的v.纵容,宠,娇养( pamper的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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